6 most infamous laws passed in MN in 2023

Last year’s legislative session in Minnesota, which concluded in May 2023, has been described as “historic.” And it was.

For the first time in eight years, the state’s Democratic party (known here as Democratic-Farmer-Labor, DFL) held the “trifecta.” With the governorship (Tim Walz) and both houses of the legislature (holding the state senate by a one-seat, 34-33 majority), Democrats wielded total control.

The website MinnPost wrote at the time:

‘Transformational’ and also ‘bonkers:’ Minnesota Legislature ends its session of historic spending, policy changes

If someone built a word cloud of all the DFL floor speeches of all their bills during this year’s legislative session, the dominant words would be “transformational,” “generational” and “historic.”

MinnPost quoted Gov. Walz on the occasion:

DFL Gov. Tim Walz called it “the most successful legislative session, certainly in many of our lifetimes and maybe in Minnesota history.

Success is in the eye of the beholder. Most notable was the state budget. Democrats managed to spend every penny of a record $18 billion budget surplus, raise billions of dollars more in taxes, and craft a record-busting $71 billion two-year budget.

But here, we’re going to focus on the “successes” involving what are euphemistically called the “divisive social issues.” Using that one-seat senate majority, Democrats overturned decades-old, carefully-crafted compromises on hot-button issues. Let’s begin with the most horrific and ghoulish ones:

Did Democrats make pedophilia a protected class? Maybe?

Under its human rights department, which dates back to the 1960’s, the state protects individuals based on a wide variety of characteristics. In 2023, Democrats added “gender identity” and similar terms to the list of protected characteristics. This change was already controversial enough, but Democrats took the wholly-unnecessary step of redefining “sexual orientation,” which was already a protected class. Here is the relevant language included in the new law (Chapter 52, Article 19, Section 47).

In reading the above paragraph (now incorporated into state law) note that the underlined language is being added to law and the lined-through language is being removed.

Previously, “sexual orientation” was carefully defined to exclude pedophilia. The original definition was narrow in scope and includes that clear and specific reference “to sexual attachment to children by an adult.”

The more “expansive” and “inclusive” language now in place would appear to include such an attraction under the words “neither” or “people.” What are we to make of this extremely broad rewriting?

Did Democrats make Minnesota a transgender “refuge” for children? Yes, yes they did.

Democrats passed Chapter 29, a stand-alone bill to create a sanctuary for “gender-affirming” care for children. Here “gender affirming” is defined to include, among other items, the following:

If this weren’t bad enough, the law authorizes local courts to seize custody of children whose out-of-state parents aren’t going along with the sex-change program:

Did Democrats legalize abortion up to birth? Yes. And this is unambiguous. A KARE-11 TV fact-check from back in April makes clear that:

The statute does not include any specific prohibitions on abortions at any stage of pregnancy.

Did Democrats legalize infanticide? Maybe?

In their zeal to remove all restrictions on the practice of abortion in the state, Democrats repealed The Born Alive Protection Act, which previously protected infants who survived botched abortions. Here’s how the index to the relevant statute appeared in 2022:

Here’s the reference to the same section today:

You will immediately notice that “positive abortion alternatives” are gone. Here is the change to the born alive infants provision (Chapter 70, Article 4, Section 56).

Previously, medical personnel were obligated to “preserve the life” of the infant. No more.

Now, they are “to care” for the infant. But not “medical” care, that word was deleted.

To understand these subtleties, we consult with the former Democratic governor of Virginia, Ralph Notham. The governor, himself a pediatric neurosurgeon, said in 2019 of such cases:

The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired. And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.

The Catholic Diocese of Duluth has reported that Minnesota legislators share similar views, writing:

Lawmakers this year also repealed Minnesota’s requirement that reasonable measures be taken to “preserve the life and health” of born-alive infants, replacing it with a requirement for “care,” which the bill’s House author, Rep. Tina Liebling, DFL-Rochester, has described as mere “comfort” care. Under the new language, an infant could be denied lifesaving care and allowed to die. 

Did Democrats create a hate-speech snitch line? Maybe?

In that same Chapter 52 mentioned above, Democrats appropriated $645,000 to the human rights department to study “civil rights trends,” as follows:

Here, the department is authorized to accept “information compiled from community organizations.” The organizations are not named, and the information is not specified. These can include “civil rights incidents.” Not crimes, incidents. The report will be posted and shared. Will the report include names?

Please note that this snitch line is different from the Covid snitch line created by Tim Walz.

Did Democrats mandate the inclusion of “ethnic studies” in schools? Yes, yes they did.

Included in Chapter 55, (Article 2, Section 13) is the following new language:

The appearance of the word “political” in the definition gives the game away. This exercise in not about educating school children on the state’s rich cultural tapestry, it’s about their political indoctrination before they reach voting age.

For more background, the Center’s Katherine Kersten wrote an opinion piece last month for the Wall Street Journal under the headline:

Tim Walz Brings “Liberated Ethnic Studies to Minnesota

Beginning in kindergarten, the state’s schoolchildren will be indoctrinated in radical racial ideology.

She writes:

Mr. Walz signed the law establishing this initiative in 2023. The department’s standards and benchmarks, approved in January, require first-graders to “identify examples of ethnicity, equality, liberation and systems of power” and “use those examples to construct meanings for those terms.”

To celebrate their record year, the DFL took the extraordinary next step of redesigning the state flag to reflect the re-founding of the Republic of Mni Sota.

We’ve compiled a top six list here, but, rest assured, many more laws passed in 2023 are deserving of national scrutiny.